Approaches to the Metres of Alliterative Verse (review)

Studies of the meters of Middle English alliterative verse have been bedevilled by the questionable reliability of the texts, since most poems are preserved in only one or two copies by scribes often at some considerable distance, both temporal and geographical, from the authors. The editors of this collection of essays tackle this head on with a discussion of Death and Liffe, probably composed in the late fourteenth century but extant only in the mid-seventeenth-century Percy Folio MS. Judith Jefferson and Ad Putter argue that the poet composed in accordance with the metrical system of "the poets of the alliterative revival" (they might have been a little more cautious and said "some of the poets"), and they offer a number of improved readings, most of which seem to me convincing. They admit that their restorations are conjectural, of course, but they protest that an editor "should not normally print something he believes the poet would not have written" (p. 291). Exactly so; my only additional comment is that there is no need to fall back on print when the internet offers the perfect home for a provisional text to be discussed and improved. Jefferson and Putter should publish an edition of Death and Liffe in that form.

Other contributors approach the meters of the poems as if they were analyzing authorized texts by modern poets, even when they know better. Thus Gilbert Youmans bases his analysis on Robert Thornton's copy of the Morte Arthure, which is demonstrably corrupt, and does not see that it matters that "the scribe, rather than the poet, may have been responsible for some of the metrical variation described" (p. 119). Comparison of Thornton's text of The Seige of Jerusalem with the other seven copies provides a pretty good indication of his scribal habits. In an essay on Gawain, Nicolay Yakovlev provocatively suggests that "a way to overcome the obstacle is to start with the assumption that the text is perfect and that linguistic variation does not exist" (p. 138, his italics). It is always a mistake to start with a demonstrably false assumption, and happily Yakovlev goes on to demonstrate that the poet's use of a full inflectional grammar is not represented by the scribal spellings.

Thomas Cable, however, does work on the assumption that the text is perfect in an attempt to show the presence of "mixed metre" in some of the Harley Lyrics. He proposes that lines have "double offbeats" (disyllabic dips), and takes a notably iambic stanza from "Blow, northern wind" as his example. He does not point out that the poem is in carol form and was either set to music or written in imitation of similar songs. He is not prepared to allow that the dominance of the iambic rhythm will prompt singers or readers to adopt the normal syllabic simplifications such as monosyllabic "power" (actually spelled poer by the scribe). Of his "possible disyllabic patterns," four depend upon adjectival -iche being interpreted as disyllabic. To read the stanzas of the poem as strictly iambic would take minimal modification, and indeed Thomas Duncan's edition in Medieval English Lyrics 1200–1400 does precisely this.

It makes more sense to start with a reasonable assumption, and revise or abandon it in the light of testing. Hoyt N. Duggan, whose article of 1986 (Speculum, 61) lies behind all subsequent studies of Middle English alliterative meter, does this in his essay "Notes on the Metre of Piers Plowman: Twenty Years On." He had begun with the hypothesis that Langland wrote within essentially the same metrical constraints as other alliterative poets. However, his more recent detailed work on the texts of Piers Plowman for the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive has made him revise this view, and he now believes that these constraints were norms rather than rules for Langland, whose verse has a number of distinctive metrical features, notably the frequent...